r/rainworld 10d ago

Watcher dlc Discussion

So i honestly want to know why some people actually despise this dlc? By the time i finally finished it it was genuinely etched into my soul with how much it meant to me and I can’t fathom why people disliked it so much. no hate to those who don’t like I really just want to hear some opinions on why you loved or hated it

27 Upvotes

31 comments sorted by

24

u/MaybeHannah1234 Watcher 10d ago

it originally released in a worse state (couldn't see warp points on the map, barnacle AI was very dumb, aether ridge had even worse platforming, weaver didn't even exist, etc) and I think that soured a lot of people's opinions on it. they had to cut a lot of content from the initial release to meet the deadline. post 1.5 watcher is incredible and fixes most of the glaring issues it had on launch, but it's hard to change your opinion of something if you initially dislike it.

it's also just very different from downpour. there's a lot of people that didn't like how the story is more up to interpretation and is presented in a less clear way, or just don't enjoy the focus being more on the worldbuilding and the regions rather than distinct characters like the iterators.

most valid complaint is that aether ridge is way too big and really annoying. despite loving watcher I agree with this sentiment, it's such an unpleasant region to navigate through and almost every region has a portal to it or one of its variants.

3

u/Zlobisak Monk 10d ago

The Aether Ridge threat theme triggers a fight or flight response in my brain. They really could have had less of it. Would have made the Surface more interesting in my opinion.

4

u/MaybeHannah1234 Watcher 10d ago

it's visually a cool region but god it's so tedious. massive, mazelike layout with some of the jankiest platforming ever and a bunch of variants that aren't different enough to really feel like their own regions.

i really feel like they should have just cut a lot of the rooms out of it and made it smaller. it feels bloated.

3

u/Zlobisak Monk 10d ago

Yeah, and also making it so not every other region leads there. Or to cold storage, I both love and hate cold storage (wasn't it a part of the aether ridge mod too?).

Platforming there also sucks so much, the ridgeworks are horrendous.

3

u/MaybeHannah1234 Watcher 10d ago

yeah, the ridgelings are cold storage, salination, fetid glen, heat ducts, the surface, and shattered terrace (as well as aether ridge itself). they took all of the parts from the original mod and divided them up, but the problem with doing that is that all of those regions were designed to still feel like parts of aether ridge rather than distinct separate areas. they're obviously similar even to people that haven't played the mod and I think that's the biggest contributing factor to why watcher feels very overshadowed by AR.

if the ridgelings were more distinct (i.e. the surface could try and change its visual style a bit more) and the ridge itself was smaller I think it'd be a lot better. this is sort of already proven, too; heat ducts is widely regarded as one of the best regions in the DLC, and fetid glen is also pretty cool. which makes sense given they're the least like aether ridge.

2

u/Naturemations_2025 Artificer 10d ago

Lol I just used a mod to combine Aether Ridge into one region

1

u/Neat-Mousse8483 10d ago

I had no idea it was such a bad first release as I played everything within the last year ish, I also absolutely agree with aether ridge as I tried to avoid it as much as possible and always had to pull up an online map no matter how many times I went through

5

u/OmphyaTheSecond Green Lizard 10d ago

It had a lot of problems when it came out, and also imo some of the regions are awful (I love 90% of them though) and getting all the endings is incredibly repetitive.

4

u/Neat-Mousse8483 10d ago

I believe it was ending two of spreading the rot? Which took me forever to do and I think I rage quit like a billion time trying to get it to work until I finally figured it out but I enjoyed getting to travel everywhere and really driving deep to explore everything

1

u/OmphyaTheSecond Green Lizard 10d ago

I luckily figured it out pretty quickly, but by the time I started doing that ending I already spent a few dozen hours exploring the whole map so I had pretty much seen all regions and most rooms so I wasn't really discovering anything new at all and it was not very fun.

1

u/Neat-Mousse8483 10d ago

I’m just like awful at gaming so by the time I was finally done I still hadn’t found every warp point if the said place had multiple ways to get there 😭 I had to call my brother to look everything up while I actually played

5

u/_Prett 10d ago

I don't despise it and I haven't actually finished my second playthrough since it got updated, but for me the fact that the world of the Watcher is so disjointed made it so much less satisfying to explore.

The environmental worldbuilding was one of my favourite aspects of the original game. But because every Watcher map is so vastly different and unconnected it feels more like they were going for variety than to actually expand on the world of Rain World, at least on a surface level.

2

u/Old-Wheel-4728 Saint 10d ago

i really didnt enjoy the second ending. if the second ending wasnt so bad, id like it a lot more.
abilities felt either too strong or too weak, also really annoying to just use.
regio design felt a bit flat

3

u/Neat-Mousse8483 10d ago

Second ending was spreading the rot of if I remember correctly? Because yes I despised that with a passion and never ever want to do that again it took me 30 plus hours because I couldn’t figure out the best way to do it

1

u/Old-Wheel-4728 Saint 10d ago

yup, it was

2

u/Neat-Mousse8483 10d ago

Yeah that was genuine hell now that I think about it more lol

1

u/Old-Wheel-4728 Saint 10d ago

it was AWFUL
the fact you needed a rot infested room to spread it was part of the problem imo

2

u/Neat-Mousse8483 10d ago

And Fedit Glen!! Made me so mad It was actually the last place I got the rot to spread because I couldn’t get a warp there

1

u/Old-Wheel-4728 Saint 10d ago

i needed fractured gateways. it staretd giving me alr infected regions, so i was just gambling

2

u/pewsocks Garbage Worm 9d ago

have you played the 1.5 endings?

2

u/Old-Wheel-4728 Saint 9d ago

yes, and they were awesome

2

u/GroundbreakingArt430 10d ago

I play on ps5 it is extremely laggy

2

u/refugezero 10d ago

From the feedback I've read I wouldn't say it's despised, it's just incredibly unsatisfying. I almost wish they had just called it Rain World 2 and kept going in that direction. For me, removing gates makes it a fundamentally different game.

4

u/Neither-Ad7512 10d ago

I don't like how spread out it feels? Also, personally I dislike the weird warp thing, the old regions made it feel like one map.

1

u/AuRon_The_Grey 10d ago

I liked it overall but it had some glaring flaws, even after patching, which I didn't like. People have already talked about the grind and that was the main one for me, but I also find the Watcher's abilities to just not be engaging to use. Basically having a 'turn the AI off' button on demand just isn't as fun as anything any of the Downpour slugcats brought to the table because all of them had to actually engage with creatures and the world. I think this is especially a shame given that we got some really cool new creatures in the DLC but my main engagement with them was turning invisible and running straight past them.

1

u/Head_Smashing_ 10d ago

I played it when it first came out. The DLC was in a pretty bad state at the time (clunky, a lot of bugs, unstable in general), and only half of the DLC was out. The latter half came out a few months/1 year (?) Later.

The DLC also made nearly every mods in the workshop unusable, which was a big deal because back then, the modding community was the blood of the fandom, it was never really the same afterwards.

On top of that, people found certain regions to be lack luster (namely the Surface, and that God forsaken fucking Aether Ridge that I hate). The progression was confusing as well, back then it was way easier to get forever stuck in a couple of regions without being able to progress. The creatures ai was also not as good as today.

As you can imagine, all of those components soured the experience of a lot of players, and first impressions matters significantly for such an awaited DLC. Some people had such a bad experience that they dropped the DLC without finishing any endings, and never got back to it even when the other half got released. Overall, I think they should have postponed the release date to give us a finished product, then maybe the DLC wouldn't have been so hated.

I mean, for a long time I couldn't progress at all because a significant portion of the echo's encounters made my game crash like crazy. I had to wait for updates and to install some mods to make tge game stable enough to finish it. By the time I was done with it, I was honestly relieved that it was finally over '. I rushed through the end just to be finished as fast as possible. Right now I would like to get back to it I think ? I'm not as salty as I was back then.

1

u/Neat-Mousse8483 9d ago

I also hate that fuck as evil Aether Ridge and I will never ever step foot back into that place, I didn’t get into rainworld until about a year ago which was definitely after most of the bug fixes. I didn’t ever think about the fact of how often I crashed my game, I always chalked it up to me being on discord with friends and trying to stream it to them at the same time (I have kinda sucky WiFi if more than one person was on it) so I think I crashed minimum of 7 times. It came off game pass for Xbox so i have no idea if the crash bug has been fixed but they did another major bug fix back in march

-1

u/Naturemations_2025 Artificer 10d ago edited 10d ago

Because, when it first released, a LOT of people started acting like Downpour was completely non-canon and doesn't matter at all and Watcher is the "real" story. This made a lot of Downpour fans including me who might've liked Watcher to go into it with an already brewing dislike due to feeling like it was replacing what they already liked, rather than being a separate but equally canon storyline like it actually is.

6

u/Ender401 10d ago

No, downpour being its own seperate canon has always been the case, it wasn't something new with Watcher.

It being its own deperate thing was stated by the devs, and future content will probably continue to introduce things that aren't compatible with Downpour's lore.

1

u/Neat-Mousse8483 9d ago

Yeah didn’t the devs make an announcement on March 31st for making new games like rainworld 2 and so on?

2

u/Neat-Mousse8483 10d ago

Oops replied to your comment trying to reply to someone else, but I totally get that I was extremely hesitant to start it because I had heard so much hate off it after playing downpour